by Greg Wilcox
My cousin Dale Foot and I had a running email conversation recently. I started it off with:
Greg: Unfortunately, it looks like budget issues have taken a back seat in this election year. Candidates have discovered that voters care much more about jobs, guns, abortion, and immigration than they do about budgets.
Dale: I hate the rhetoric of politics. There is no common sense. I don't want to give up my reasonable gun rights, but I see them being challenged by laws passed to keep someone from taking an Uzi to school. I like nature but don't want to destroy a state's economy by banning most logging.
Greg: Dale, I understand what you're saying. May I present another point of view? Not necessarily a counter-argument, just one from a different perspective.
Donella Meadows wrote an article called The Fall Of The Wild. It's in the current issue (Spring 1996) of the Amicus Journal (a publication of the Natural Resources Defense Council. She says:
"At some point, the busy human economy will have to stop expanding into wilderness, either because we decide to leave some bit of nature untouched or because there will be no untouched nature left.
"For much of Europe, the choice is long past. No place there is wild enough to teach us, as Wendell Berry says, what nature would be doing if people were doing nothing. In the United States we can still stop short of stamping our imprint on 100 percent of our land. How much should we leave? Ten percent? Two percent? Zero?
"If we choose 10 percent, we are already too late..."
World population has doubled to almost 6 billion people in the last 40 years. It will double again by 2016. Experts in the field of sustainable development say that the Earth's carrying capacity is somewhere in the range of 1 to 10 billion.
Several studies have been done which refute the notion that it's jobs versus the environment. For example, one study of the economy in the Pacific Northwest showed an inverse correlation between logging and economic growth. In areas where logging was curtailed, the economy did better than those where it continued unabated.
Maybe we're doing the loggers a disservice by displacing their jobs. Or maybe we're doing their grandchildren a favor by allowing some trees to remain for them.
Do you remember the lines from the Joni Mitchell song Big Yellow Taxi?
They took all the trees
And put 'em in a tree museum
And charged all the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em
Hey farmer, farmer, put away that DDT now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees (please!)
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got til it's gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
Many people claim that laws like the Endangered Species Act go overboard in their protection of the environment. They say the ESA protects spotted owls at the expense of humans. "Sierra", the magazine of the Sierra Club, has a page called "The Last Word". Every month, they ask a question, and publish a sample of reader responses the following month. In the last issue, the question was "Has the ESA gone too far?" This issue, a reader wrote back to say "If it had, we would no longer need it."
I would encourage you to visit the World Wide Web site of Zero Population Growth. I'd be very interested in your comments.
Dale: I use the Internet to download proposed laws from THOMAS. I get baffled by what I see. The media does a disservice to the country by not telling more about the nuts and bolts of government.
Greg: The 104th Congress has intentionally shrouded its legislation by attaching anti-environmental riders to unrelated bills. It worked for awhile, but the public is starting to catch on. Hopefully we'll see more honesty and disclosure in future legislation as a result.
Dale: Controversy sells commercials. Dull legislation doesn't. I wish I knew the answer. Meanwhile, the common sense flies out the window and nothing meaningful gets done in Washington. I know several common sense steps which could greatly improve my part, but they will probably never happen because of the political powers fighting against common sense solutions.
Greg: Dale, I'd be very interested in hearing your common sense steps. That's something this country can use more of. (You might even want to send them to President Clinton at the White House.)
Dale: Greg, I did visit ZPG and National Resources Defense Council on the Web.
I am concerned when ZPG rejects out of hand the Welfare Reform bill for a narrow range of issues dealing with denial of family planning services. I understand that is ZPG's focus though. As you showed in your portrait of the logging states situation above, we need to keep the big picture in focus.
I totally agree that overpopulation is a major problem. I didn't hurt that equation (I have 2 children, and I guess they could have more than two children each, but I hope they don't) but I didn't help either.
Major shifts are needed to stem the overpopulation issue. Major religions of the world ignore it. In this country, those who can best take care of children tend to have the least, whereas those can't afford or shouldn't have children, do in excess. I think education is probably the most powerful tool to deal with this issue.
I helped set up a temporary homeless center at my church for a week. One woman was pregnant with her seventh child. Six of her children were taken away and placed in foster care. I am sure she has a major drug problem. Women like her typically have a crack cocaine addiction. I saw one woman (on a claim at work) who was pregnant, had 12 children by different men and all were removed to foster care. I don't have an easy solution, but such people should not have children. But whenever someone brings up concrete ideas to deal with the situation, too many start yelling mindless things -- such as genocide. I am sure you have heard all of this before.
Too many people refuse to be responsible for their own actions. Instead they seem to be rewarded for not being responsible. That is why the welfare reform bill is dear to me. I don't want to cut people off cold hearted. I want people to succeed. There has to be some sort of penalty for not trying. Too many people refuse to make that effort. Too many people lack a work ethic. It's the "I am owed" and "I demand" mentality that is destroying too many impoverished people.
I did not know the US is the third most populated country. When measured by population per square mile, I am sure we are way down the list.
About my earlier statements of common sense in government, I think about how much money can be wasted on small projects. For example, we spend millions cleaning up some questionable toxic sites, but spend peanuts to see that all women really get good prenatal care. We also need to be pragmatic. For example, it is my understanding that it costs much more to execute someone with a death penalty in this country than to give them a life sentence.